It is well known that tracking customer satisfaction is an important technique for sustained competitive advantage. Measures of customer satisfaction, based on a variety of survey techniques, have been developed and are well known. Survey techniques include: telephone interviews, emailed survey forms, and web site “intercepts.” All such techniques have the commonalities of being time consuming and expensive to perform. An example well-known measure of customer satisfaction is the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI is produced by the ACSI LLC, a private company based in Ann Arbor, Mich., U.S.A.
More recently, however, customers are using online tools to express their opinions about a wide range of products and services. Many such online tools can be described as being under the general category of “Social Media” (or SM). Online tools in this category include, but are not limited to, the following:                FACEBOOK, Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif., U.S.A.)        TWITTER, Inc. (San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A.)        all variety of “web logs” or “blogs”        all variety of “Web 2.0” sites, that facilitate feedback from a site's audience or readers        
The availability of such SM content raises the question of whether, with appropriate technology, it can be used to provide information similar to traditional customer satisfaction measures.